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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/24895291">Light is Therefore Colour</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/bene_elim/pseuds/bene_elim'>bene_elim</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Criminal Minds (US TV)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Character Study, Colors, Gen, Introspection, if u choose to read this PLEASE read the notes, it is essentially just a writing exercise, look......this is actually a draft that was getting nowhere and i just decided to post okay?, mentions of alzheimer's and schizophrenia bc of Diana Reid, there is less plot in this than there has been in any of my other fics, uhhh idek how to tag this tbh</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-06-24</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-06-24</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-04 01:53:45</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>1,756</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/24895291</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/bene_elim/pseuds/bene_elim</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>A short study of Spencer's character set against the backdrop of a setting sun and the colour yellow. Please read the author's notes before reading! </p>
<p>- </p>
<p>
  <i>'When Spencer had been three, maybe four, he and his mother had planted sunflower seeds and measured their growth, Spencer intrigued by the way they grew towards the light. His mother had shown him van Gogh’s paintings of sunflowers and, at the time, Spencer had not been able to understand why one might paint the same thing over, and over, and over again. Variations on a theme.'</i>
</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>6</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>16</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>Light is Therefore Colour</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>hi everyone! this was something i started writing over a month ago but it never got anywhere. i kept coming back to it and trying to pry something interesting out of it, to get some sort of plot or at the very least relationship exploration, but like i said - it just never got anywhere. i really struggled, but i also didn't want to just delete it because the quality of writing isn't <i>bad</i>, per se. </p>
<p>as you can probably tell from what i write, my interests lie in the complete 'opposite' of science: i am an artist with a lot of passion for art history, art theory and colour theory behind me, which is why i make so many art references. i wanted this to seem natural for spencer despite the fact he is clearly more logically and mathematically minded, and i tried to use the opening that his love of literature and poetry provides to slip in some stuff about art. i really hope it doesn't feel forced, but at the same time, this is literally a plotless introspection that serves as more of a writing exercise than it does as a fic, so... i don't care too much. </p>
<p>as such, this is not necessarily 'complete' - it doesn't really have an ending, and i wouldn't even know where to begin writing more of this. i'm not posting it because it's a good story to share, i'm posting it because as unhappy as i am with the direction it took, it is nonetheless a fairly substantial piece of writing that i did and that does not lack quality and i feel it would be a waste for it to never be seen.  </p>
<p>with all this said, i hope that your expectations are not too high and that you enjoy what is to come. </p>
<p>(title is a quote of j.m.w turner from an 1818 lecture; i don't know how obvious it is but turner is my absolute favourite artist. when the new £20 notes came out - which i had been eagerly anticipating for the past 6 years, i stg - i immediately took the first one i received and stuck it up on my wall, turner facing outwards. idc that that's £20 i could be using - its TURNER!!)</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>The sun was setting yellow, orange flecks ablaze on the silver side of clouds. Pale, pale blue, diluted and weak, stretched, overwhelmed by the sheer gold and bright. Colours for which one could weep, of the sort that seemed so vividly tangible it was impossible to believe them to be true.</p>
<p>Spencer hadn’t watched the sunset for years, and years, and years: not since he’d been tied to a goalpost with no choice but to feel his hope sinking with each inch the sun crept beneath the horizon. The sunset then had been dazzling in the worst of ways. The evening heat had made the light shimmer on the horizon, angry magenta welts of colour splashing the sky like the bleeding gashes on his heart. He’d been all of ten and he’d lost the romantics of a beautiful sunset. They were never worth his time, after that. They were completely inconsequential. Beauty can’t strike a chord with those who refuse to look.</p>
<p>But tonight – oh, tonight, it was bright. It blazed and denied being ignored: he could not turn his head away. It glowed with gold so intense that his eyes watered, and suddenly Spencer understood why van Gogh obsessed over the colour. Sunflowers backed by yellow and in yellow vase. When Spencer had been three, maybe four, he and his mother had planted sunflower seeds and measured their growth, Spencer intrigued by the way they grew towards the light. His mother had shown him van Gogh’s paintings of sunflowers and, at the time, Spencer had not been able to understand why one might paint the same thing over, and over, and over again. Variations on a theme.</p>
<p>If he were a painter, he would paint this sunset a thousand times.</p>
<p>That morning, he had cried. He grieved for his mother, who was not dead. Just lost. Her letter had been almost unreadable, handwriting so unrecognisable that for moments Spencer could do nothing but just stare at it, lost himself, before he made any effort to decipher what was written. He’d gone in to work, tears wiped and existent only in the damp splotches on paper stuffed in an envelope and resting back home on top of all his other letters from his mother. No-one had suspected a thing, which was exactly what he wanted, and he had let the monotony of filing paperwork and reviewing case reports lull him into a hypnotic state just to get through the day. When he had left on time rather than staying later like he often did, everyone assumed that he was off to the Academy, or to the library. He let them think what they wanted.</p>
<p>But he had come home. And he had tried to write back, but the pen felt so heavy in his hand. It was a star and he was the space fabric barely able to keep it in place and his words were the lost pieces of space debris that hurtled around so chaotically that they he felt he could die if one struck wrong. And then he had tried to read, but he kept gravitating like a planet to a book on the Sun, and then to a book about van Gogh, and then finally on one about J. M. W. Turner. He’d been helpless as he’d turned to the page about Turner’s pigments, already knowing exactly what it said, eyes skipping past the gloriously technicolour glossy pictures of sunset, after sunset, after sunset. Variations on a theme.</p>
<p>These men, obsessed. Yellow tinted glasses: how would it be, he wondered, to see the world through the endless haze of warmth that accompanies the golden hour. These men, so obsessed with this colour; what did they <em>see?</em></p>
<p>Turner had painted relentlessly with yellow despite it being unpopular at the time. He used orpiment pigment, a sulphide of arsenic - how ironic! The very thing that brought the man joy, that he relished in the use of above all other colours and would not be able to paint without, so destructive and poisonous.</p>
<p>He looked out. The cloud wisps danced like partners at a ball on a yellow marble floor, the blinding disc of burning white steadily dipping, dipping, dipping from view. Soon it would be dark, and the yellow light from the bulbs would illuminate his apartment instead, casting murky shadows in all the corners that the current glow lit with grace. Perhaps tonight he would light those candles that Garcia had given him some years ago. Perhaps he would just sit in the dark and let the silver shine of the moon be his light. He wasn’t sure why he was feeling so contemplative this evening – all he knew was that he normally lived his life as a series of equations and literary descriptions, a mix of chemistry and mathematics that came so easily to him as well as the literature his mother has poured into him that he loves just as much as science. But this sunset had opened the floodgates to a wave of pictures he remembers from galleries and art books, ones that he always glanced at and then filed away, because art had never been a priority to him. Colour, for a long period, had been merely the chemical pigments used and the waves of light that allows the eye to differentiate between green, red, and blue.</p>
<p>There had been a boy, when Spencer was little, that had lived on his street. Spencer had walked past his house every day on his way to and from school. He had piqued Spencer’s interest because, on a street of dulling white front doors, all peeling and a little grey around the edges, this house stood out with a startling India Yellow entrance way. Maybe there was something to the idea of yellow being a colour symbolising happiness, because Spencer had never failed to smile when he walked past it. He hadn’t gotten along well with the boy who lived there, for he was a few years older than Spencer and able to somehow memorise exactly what drove Spencer to tears so that he could keep pushing the same buttons every time. Spencer had quickly caught on and refused to give him satisfaction of seeing him cry by teaching himself how to lock away those emotions. But, regardless, Spencer had been inspired by his yellow door. He had thought it wonderful, to have the last thing you see as you leave the house be an expanse of colour that you love, and the first thing you see when you arrive home to be that very same comfort. A beacon: here reside I, and I am content. He’d asked to paint their front door like that; his father hadn’t looked up from his paper when he dismissed the idea. <em>No. What’s the point? We don’t have the money for that, anyway, Spencer</em>. His mother had smiled soothingly and told him, <em>Of course, Spencer. We’ll do that one day.</em></p>
<p>One day had stretched on, and on, and on – and culminated in his father leaving and his mother retreating into her mind more often than not. That was probably when he stopped considering colour to mean much of anything. When he had moved into his flat in DC, he briefly entertained the thought of painting his door a deep aubergine purple, his favourite colour, but he quickly brushed the idea away, dismissing it just as his father had done years ago as being a waste of time and effort. Some nights, coming home from a long case that had ended badly, he wished he <em>had </em>painted his door so that he might be greeted with a comfort that was solely his and his alone. A barrier between the bad cases and the safety of his home. But in the morning, the thought would be gone, once again.</p>
<p>It was fading now, the light, and the gold was sinking into something deeper. Indigo crept forth from the corners of his flat, Prussian blues, melting away the warmth and replacing it with quickly cooling darkness. The sky outside shone with the lasting impressions of pinks, violets, a sliver of gold still glittering on the horizon like a florescent strip light in an otherwise dark building. Stars had started to make themselves known, only the brightest of them for now, blinking boldly like celestial lighthouses. This was more to Spencer’s comfort, the open night sky. He may be afraid of the dark, but with a nightlight or candle to light his own little corner, he was happy to stare into the endless expanse above him and name as many of the constellations that he could see with the unaided eye. With each minute passing, each inch of light spluttering out, the sky became more and more like a dreamscape that Spencer lost himself in: he may not make a habit of watching the sunset, but he was familiar with the night.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>- Parts I cut from the main text and no longer fit anywhere: - </p>
<p>There were a lot of things that Spencer knew. He knew how to calculate the amount of time between events down to the second; he knew each stage of the formation of stars and planets; he knew statistics on almost anything; he knew the entire periodic table by heart; he knew the migration patterns of almost all migrating birds. He knew by heart so many poems by so many poets, ancient through to contemporary; he could recite with his eyes closed every book by Dickens, and by Austen, and by Hugo. He could recite every word Shakespeare ever wrote without falter.</p>
<p>-</p>
<p>He imagines sometimes that Maeve’s favourite colour was yellow, though he knows from letters exchanged that it was actually a deep teal. That’s okay. He’s seen enough Turner paintings to know that the two are a pair, inseparable, a gift of sky and ocean twins.</p>
<p>-</p>
<p>His favourite was Andromeda, for he marvelled at the story of a mother whose arrogance condemned her entire family to the skies and her daughter to an unjust death, only to be saved at the last moment. He thought he perhaps saw something of himself in the princess chained to rocks helpless but to await her fate. His mother might not have been at fault for putting him in such a position as Cassiopeia was for Andromeda’s, but some days he nonetheless felt as though he was constantly reaping the consequences of having to grow up so quickly and look after his mother all alone when he wasn’t ready.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>as always, reviews are appreciated. thank you so much for taking the time to read this. and thank you to all my past reviews on previous fics: i may not reply (because i have a weird ocd thing about replying to reviews but that isn't the weirdest thing my ocd has prevented me from doing, so whatever) but i want you all to know that i 100% read every single word that you write me and then go and squeal and cry from happiness that people enjoy my writing. it makes me so incredibly pleased and appreciative of every single reader and it the thing that encourages me to keep writing and keep posting, despite my sometimes crippling anxiety. so thank you, so so so much: your kind words of love and encouragement and pleasure fuel me and make me smile every time i read them.</p></blockquote></div></div>
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